Tag Archives: 100mm f2.8 lens

Tuesday 10th November 2009 – I’ve had another day today …

… where I’ve done very little. Mostly bringing stuff up from downstairs and giving it a good clean as you have no idea just how musty and dusty everything has become through being in my little room down there. In fact I reckon that I could do with a good dusting down and de-musting as well.

I’ve also been discovering stuff that I had forgotten all about. That’s the one good thing about moving – all the things that you find.

But I’ve also been having one of those days where I can’t get anything very much to work. My old laptop broke down in the summer – the external power supply packed up and I’ve not been able to find a new one (anyone have an old Lenovo power supply unit anywhere?). I bought an external caddy and fitted the hard drive into it so that I can copy the data. “Plug and play” they say, but will it work? Will it ‘eck. I’ve even been e-mailing the manufacturers and they aren’t able to help all that much. We’ve now got it down to having to initialise the hard drive so that the new laptop can pick it up, and I’ve worked out how to do it, but when I click on the button to do it, I get a “device not ready” error message. In “properties”, I get a “this device is working correctly” message. Someone is speaking with forked tongue.

And that’s not all. I put my new lens onto the camera today – and nothing! Now it’s an old manual SLR lens but it should still work using the manual settings on the camera, but not at all. Aparently you need to set it up in the “menu”. Now anyone would think that there would be an option “use manual lens” in the menu, but of course there isn’t. You need to scroll through seven screens before you find a “disable automatic ring fitting” and when you do that, that’s only the first of several steps. I’m onto step 4 but it’s getting late and I’ll look at the rest when I’m awake tomorrow.

But there’s some kind of hope yet – for when I was finding things that I had forgotten about I came across the original lens for the camera – the one I discarded not long after I bought the thing. And that, would you believe, stops down to f1.7, which is even lower than the new one. The max focal length is only 70mm so the images will need to be cropped down and that will reduce the quality, but the quality is so poor anyway that it won’t make much difference and in any case, with a need for only half the light of the current lens, I can tweak the quality by means of the camera settings (faster speed, lower ISO setting etc). There are two night matches on Saturday so if I can’t get the new lens working I’ll have a go with the lens that I uncovered and see what difference that makes.

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Monday 26th October 2009 – I didn’t do an awful lot today.

In fact, it was a day of interruptions.

Starting as we mean to go on, I wasn’t upstairs 10 minutes before the phone rang. The man from Nazar …. errr… DHL rang to seek directions to chez moi. I carried on with tidying up last night’s wiring efforts and Terry rang, asking if he could borrow my compressor.

Then Terry came round – and he helped me finish the wiring. I was struggling to get the 2x10mm cables for the heater element through the conduit – not something it’s easy to do yourself, so while Terry started it off I went to look for my patent cable dragger. And by the time I came back with it, Terry had threaded it through on his own. It pays to have an expert around the place.
In fact, I had a friend who was acknowledged as an expert by everyone else.
But in that case, it was spelt ex-spurt and ex is a has-been and spurt is a drip under pressure.

After that the man from DHL turned up with a little package for me, and then it was lunchtime.

Once lunch was over I played the usual game of “hunt the keys for Caliburn” and when I eventually found them I drove Caliburn round the back here and loaded him full of scaffolding to take round to Terry tomorrow – all the time half-expected to be confronted by The Ghost Of Farmer Parrett and his pitchfork again.

attic concrete base woodstove tile brick edge
In the attic I did manage to do some work today. All of the chimney is now connected up, sealed and clamped together, and I’ve also done something to the concrete base.

If you follow the comments to the various entries (they are often the most exciting part) you’ll know that Krys and I have been discussing the edging to the concrete. I wanted to put a raised edge around it although Krys thinks (and rightly so) that it will be difficult to keep clean.

I’m still worried about flying embers though, but there’s no point in soliciting advice if you don’t intend to take any notice, so what I did was to put a raised edge around the front and most of the sides, and leave the back open so I can brush out around there.

And what did the man from DHL want? Well, he brought me my new lens that I talked about the other day. And that was quick delivery – I wish Amazon would be this quick from the States. And €36 customs and charges – that’s an enormous rip-off if you ask me.

I’m disappointed with the lens though. It’s very small and you would hardly notice it. Freud had a thing or two to say about camera lenses, something along the lines of them being substitutes for part of the anatomy in the same way that guns and sports cars might be. And I was hoping for a whopper. The filter size is 49mm, which I don’t have, so that means a 20-quid order to the 7-Day Shop.

The lens is a manual focus (not a problem because with the footy, the focus is always “full on”) and that reminds me of a story I heard about the two blondes on the beach, being approached by the beach photographer.
“Keep still” said one. “He’s going to focus!“
“What? Both of us?“

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Thursday 22nd October 2009 – FIAT LUX!

12 volt LED lights attic LIDL les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd we aren’t talking about Italian cars and washing powder either.

This photo here was taken at about 20:00 this evening and the reason that you can see inside the room here is that I now have four lights all properly connected and switched!

They are in fact four of those 12-volt LED lights that I bought from LIDL a few weeks ago and while they may not look very bright; that’s just 4 watts of lighting in there.

Dunno about you, but I think that’s quite impressive.< And that's not all. I now have 12-volt power all around the room, and also mains power too. My electrical day was quite profitable and, much to my surprise, everything worked straight away. I didn't need to make any adjustments at all.

I’ve not done the 6-volt circuit yet though because I ran out of time doing the 230-volt lighting so I’ll do that tomorrow morning. And neither have I done the telephone. In fact, I dunno how to wire up the telephone plug so I’ll have to do some research into that.

Liz and Terry are coming round to pick up some stuff so I told them that if they can’t find me anywhere, look to see if there’s anything black and shrivelled stuck to the ceiling. That’ll be me having made a false move with the mains wiring.

But talking of Lux, the washing powder, do you remember the advert from the 1960s?
“If it’s safe in water it’s safe in Lux<" I wrote to them at the time "Now, about my goldfish ....”

In other news, I’ve been spending more money that I don’t have.

I’ve effectively abandoned night action photography because the lens on my camera won’t stop down far enough to let in enough light to take effective photos. And when I crop them they are far too grainy, as you will have noticed.

But that’s the problem with budget lenses – and by that I mean anything under about 500 quid and I don’t have that kind of money.

Rhys and I were discussing that last night and he found a second-hand lens, a Pentax 100mm f2.8 telephoto on the internet . If you don’t know much about photography, basically it’s one and a half times as long as the maximum on my zoom lens (which is a 17mm-70mm) so it needs less cropping, and it only needs about 2/3rds of the light that mine uses. It’s an old lens but they had a very good write-up and were much in demand by action and portrait photographers back in the old days.

And the price? Well, only $129 (plus $40 postage from the USA). I’m not going to get anything better than that on my limited budget so I’ve bitten the bullet and it’s on its way to here. I hope it works properly and does the business for me, as I’m not going to get anything better without spending a real shed-load of money.

And in other other news, this blog attracts quite a wide audience. It has its regular followers and contributors, but it also has a considerable number of lurkers who just quietly read it. I was talking on a messenger program last night to one of the aforementioned lurkers – Sheila – who I haven’t seen around for some time. It appears that Sheila’s mother has suffered an aneurysm – the same that did for poor Liz back in March – and while she has had the operation the prognosis is not too optimistic.

So what would be nice would be that we all find a quiet minute or two and think about Sheila and her mum and send them both some positive vibes. They could do with some right now.

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